One of the more useful articles I read in recent years is “Don’t Call Yourself a Programmer” by Patrick McKenzie. Unlike many advice articles that tend to sugarcoat certain matters, he doesn’t hold back any punches in pointing out why programmers sell themselves short.
This is my adaptation of that article — the “Realities of Your Industry 101” for new UX (User Experience) practitioners.
It’s common knowledge that what’s taught in school doesn’t always match the expectations of the real world — the details of this picture tend to be too blurry for inexperienced folks to fully comprehend. Computer science graduates finding themselves stuck in a rut when being throw into fix an actual software bug; young educators realize that teaching a class is mostly about keeping the children from starting a riot; junior business managers find out that actual corporate finance is as clear as mud as they are digging through the financial records archive...
This is no exception for my field. While the specifics do vary from case to case, and I will definitely hear about disagreements — if you are a UX person yourself, I’m confident that you can validate most of these points as you jump from one place to another.
Just a heads up: don’t feel too discouraged about what you read here. These are just the things your instructors might not have felt comfortable enough to tell you because you were still a student. (Or maybe they didn’t even know themselves. At the time of writing this piece in late 2020, most of the observations will likely remain true for at least within the next five to ten years — I’m hoping that more of the negative parts below will improve over time. So, we shall see; I remain cautiously optimistic.)
Let’s get started.
Education and Credentials
Short answer: academic credentials don’t matter in the grand scheme of things.
Long answer:
Having reputable credentials from brand name institutions will certainly jump-start your career faster and give you a higher odds of getting into better organizations, but the combination of your track record and your personal network will soon overshadow the credentials. In other words, it’s more about how good you can become and how many helpful people you will get to befriend.
(And no, it doesn’t matter if you are a bootcamp graduate or if you taught yourself. No one really cares once you have some years of practical experience under your belt and you have a great-looking portfolio with a variety of works to showcase, and more so if you have a proven track record of helping businesses succeed in competitive markets.)
But the biggest exception to the above is the research side of things. At least in established environments, there tends to be a fairly high threshold to overcome as prospective UX researchers — which are the theoretical foundation of social science research methods and quantative reasoning skills. These are both extremely hard to properly learn on your own, and it does take at least a few years of studying and good mentorship for one to become sufficiently equipped to utilize this knowledge.
A master’s degree in relevant fields such as Human-Computer Interaction, Applied Cognitive Science, or related fields is often required (and for that reason, if you do hold such a degree, I would be cautious of joining firms that are happy to hire young “researchers” that have little relevant academic qualifications). For the most prestigious positions, a doctoral degree is inevitable.
UX in Low “UX Maturity” Environments
The term “user experience” itself is a good place to cut into — contrary to what your instructors might have told you or what you’ve read in the books, a lot of places where they claim to do UX barely involve any users in their research & testing, if any at all. If your team always has easy ways to reach product users, has an abundance of great research data to refer to, and have additional resources to do more of both, do know that your environment is an exception and not the norm.
There are three reasons why this happens in organizations:
They don’t even know what the term UX really stands for and are just filling the position likely because competitors or other divisions are hiring for such roles. Don’t expect to grow your core skills in these organizations.
They simply don’t care or don’t want to involve the users at all. They are listing UX as one of their marketable points when advertising to clients. They will always cut corners during any UX steps whenever they can.
They do care about involving users in their processes, but they cannot consistently do so. It could be due to a limited budget, the peculiarities of the clients’ industry culture, the lack of senior management support, or any other constraints.
It goes without saying that, as a practitioner, you should avoid choosing the first two options if you have the choice. They likely have no UX representation among the leadership and people staffed in “UX roles” always struggle to get anything done. They just are not good for your professional growth nor your mental health.
These are often pretty easy to spot during interviews: at the technical interview stage, ask about the users of their products or services, as well as how they work with their users. If any of their response sounds made-up or murky, that’s a huge red flag to look out for. (And if they are offering you a job without having gone through any UX or design interview, just run to the nearest exit as fast as possible and never look back.)
The third one is... interesting. Mainly because there is a whole spectrum of members in here, regardless of size or type, ranging from “small teams with a few staff” all the way to “large teams with culture related issues.” That said, don’t feel too defeated if you find yourself in an environment like this; even without consistent access to users, many of them can still be good places to work at and grow as a UX person. The challenge is, if you view user involvement as a crucial part of your work (and you should), it can be somewhat demoralizing to have to repeatedly grapple with this limit.
How about introducing changes? Unless you are high up enough in the hierarchy of a large firm and can garner enough buy-in from the higher authorities — barring a deus ex machina scenario — it’s also near impossible for you to introduce any fundamental and meaningful change to the establishment. If you really don’t like the environment you are in, it’s far easier to just switch job to a more compatible team or organization.
(If we refer to Jakob Nielsen’s classification of Corporate UX Maturity stages, firms in this category would mostly resemble those of stages 3-5: the UX teams have high hopes to deliver great UX, but there are tall barriers they have to overcome. If you aren’t remotely close to an executive level position, then it’s not your job nor within your capability to tear down those barriers.
A tangential point to this is that, if you’re young and just starting out in this field, you do not want to be the first hire in your department — especially if it’s a bigger and older organization that are slow to adapt to changes. Save yourself from frustrations and go to places where you can learn from more experienced teammates.)
Expectations and Communications
Which brings us to the opposite scenario of professionals in UX roles but aren’t actually doing much UX work. You might be asking yourself “what the heck is this guy saying” when you read that last sentence.
Allow me to explain: the UX field saw an explosive growth in the past 10 years or so, which has attracted many professionals who came from other roles, many of whom haven’t had adequate UX education or training, but have plenty of job experience otherwise.
They typically used to work at a job that requires consistent interactions with other people, such as project management or sales. Despite that they might not be good at UX, many of them are actually more effective in driving business results than UX specialists with an orthodox background, due to their soft skills, connections, and other less obvious strengths. It goes without saying that which group receives a more favorable view in the eyes of the management.
(And the hidden story is… companies don’t know how to properly recruit UX talents.)
In contrast, highly educated specialists have a tendency to unconsciously restrict themselves into only seeing their work through a “best practice” cone — you know, the ones who can’t stop blabbering about the technicalities no matter who they talk to. They often struggle to set aside imperfections quickly enough to focus more on things that matter more to the business, and so they end up butting head with others almost every time they talk. If the description above reminds you of any recent memories, well, it’s perhaps time for a change.
How you should approach this varies in different circumstances, though it generally comes down to how good you are at balancing UX needs vs everything else:
Good data is not cheap, so the research is never enough and the insights are always spotty. Rather than getting frustrated, save your time by studying the markets and existing products, so you can let your intuition plus experience guide your work whenever you need to and speak with confidence (or at least do your best to fake it sometimes). In some places, you may need to do that a lot.
Learn how to persuade different groups by speaking their lingo, whether it be sales or engineering. The easiest way to do this is to befriend members of other teams and talk over meals or walks to get coffee. And given the current pandemic circumstances, virtual coffee chats would work too. (No, I’m not an extrovert, and I had to try very hard to push myself out of the comfort zone. It hasn’t been easy, but it’s totally worth the sweat.)
Speaking of befriending others — get to know people and avoid making enemies unless you absolutely have no choice. Doing UX work often requires asking for favors, such as testing survey formats and getting feedback on your designs. It would be quite difficult to ask adversaries to help you. Most importantly, learn how to negotiate, effectively.
If your company has business with enterprise customers, don’t ever get on the bad side of the money-makers (read: sales). Especially the top performing ones that always bring in multi-million dollar leads. These people usually have allies way above the chain of command and can easily shut off your gateway to your users (read: clients), both of which can make your work life miserable.
Revisions are inevitable, no matter how great your work is or how well you plan ahead of time. The design specifications you get may often be incomplete (or even non-existent), and there will be delays, miscommunications, or power dynamics at play. Always expect people to come to you to make changes to your work for whatever reason, frequently for the worse, and you definitely won’t feel good no matter how you view the situation. Pick your fights carefully; don’t play hardball if you are unsure whether you can stomach the consequences or not.
UX Is Great, but It Is Also Neutral
(This entire section is basically a lesson learned in blood. You experience may differ. I’m just summing up my personal view as well as stories I heard from others.
I should also note that I’m not a fan of where the field is at nowadays, but I don’t have the power to steer the ship towards a different direction.)
Here is the current reality in a nutshell: Creating great UX doesn’t necessarily equal to doing right by your users. Maybe in the past, but this is no longer the case.
Just like a knife can be used to prepare food and to inflict harm — UX is not inherently good nor evil, and plenty UX creativity is indeed directed into supporting malicious agendas such as incentivizing addiction or manipulating perception.
Here’s why: if you aren’t working in a public institution and non-profit, your success as an individual in the commercial sector is tied to how effective you are at helping the company win more customers and make money, multiplied by the social capital you accumulate along the way.
In other words: When working for a company, your goal is to do whatever that benefits its business, which may or may not entail delivering objectively good UX. So it’s never just about what you do with UX in itself — not the quality of your usability test, research report, or interactive prototype. Doing good UX, in the business context, is oftentimes a means to an end.
(And then there’s yet the work politics element no matter where you are. A harmless organization can easily enforce harmful agendas if there are bad actors in the management team.)
If your UX work doesn’t help the firm’s services or products drive more profit or reduce costs of operation, in any direct or indirect manner whatsoever, then you are merely seen as a cost center in the eyes of the upper management.
This is gonna sound controversial, but if you want to maximize you success within this industry, you need to internalize the fact that there is little to no value in doing the right UX if it doesn’t serve your company’s business goals… some goals might be downright immoral and sociopathic, so it’s up to you to decide whether or not you want to stay or get out of the organization. Better think through your decisions and choose wisely earlier than to later regret the negative impacts you produced.
If you aspire to apply your knowledge to only do good for the society and nothing else, then a majority of the companies are just out of your picture. That’s just how it is.
(Many say that the big tech companies’ increasing investment into UX is tainting this discipline. There is definitely some truth in that. What immediately comes to mind are the dark patterns and stories such as the ones narrated in The Social Dilemma. An all too common case of this that I despise: when unsubscribing a marketing email or uninstalling an annoying app, they want to make you feel guilty by showing a line of text with a pitiful sounding tone, as if somebody is begging you to not commit a crime.
But businesses are going to do whatever they can to make more money because that’s the sole purpose they exist. And who am I to judge? I myself have worked for multiple private firms.
That said, if you’d like to find a good midpoint between work-life balance and doing meaningful work, academic libraries can be a great option. And you get to read new books for free all the time. How cool is that? Although, at least within the US, you do often need an ALA accredited degree to be working in specialized library roles.)
It’s also good to be aware of that most of the UX effort at established companies is cookie-cutter work — for every one person that’s breathing on innovative and cool ideas at a startup, there are nine others in various corporations working on variations of a project that has been done many thousand times in the past. Quite honestly, a lot of it is just boring work, like rearranging UI elements on yet another enterprise web analytics portal. It’s a simple fact that there are many not-so-flashy designs and products that need to be created, and so there are equally unexciting UX tasks that need to be done.
And that also means there isn’t one “UX job” that can define or represent every other positions — we all do something slightly different in our respective positions and organizations depending on a multitude of other factors like local regulations and business culture. For instance, a person at mega corporation versus another one at a five-person team may share an identical title, but the work they do and the role they play (read: politicking) are drastically different, to the extent that it’s entirely possible that neither of them can do the other person’s job very well if they were to switch places.
(The entirety of this section sums up to why I always remind myself that I need to take whatever industry-related information with a grain of salt, because context matters more than anything else in this day and age where everyone can throw their opinions into the discussion with just a few minutes of smashing the keyboard.)
“What Is This Eww-Eggs You’re Talking About?”
Generally speaking, there is still a significant amount of people who don’t know what UX is exactly. Non-programmers might not know how coding works, but they at least they are aware that they don’t know. With UX, it seems like almost everyone has a different understanding of what UX practitioners do.
Some think we design graphics, some think we analyze market trends, and some think we develop apps. Part of this is that UX is hard to define due to its multidisciplinary nature — many of us do indeed function as an one-man army that fills in for multiple roles and we do all those things!
(The worst offender I have came across myself was this executive I met at a meetup, who thought the UX workers at his company are the expensive cheerleaders for the engineering team because of all the brainstorming activities he saw through the transparent conference rooms.)
This is especially true for industries whose root isn’t in technology or software, but heavily rely on those resources to run their business, and the management happens to decide it’s time to get some of that “pretty UX stuff” sprinkle over their products.
That said, at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter what decision-makers think you do as long as they know you can help the company to stay competitive in the market; everything else you do is just the ritual for arriving to that destination.
When asked, I use a two-part approach to introduce myself to an audience unfamiliar (or even hostile) with UX: I first state my title as it is, and then recite “I talk to customers and find out how we can make products easier to use.” The rest is just a matter of using as little jargon as possible, let your polished work demonstrate what values you can bring to the table, and hope for the best. Since many UX deliverables can be presented visually, remember to make great use of that advantage.
Also, experience tells me that most non-technical folks don’t even know what’s the difference between a wireframe vs a mockup, let alone gobbledygook sounding terms like “contextual inquiry” or “proto-persona”; they would just stare at you blankly if you mention those words. So don’t get too caught up on explaining the details, unless it’s a necessary situation like scoping a major project with a large group of collaborators and you need everyone to be on the same page.
Find out the what-why-who conditions of the project, briefly explain your process in plain terms (mixing in whichever domain-specific terms that they can relate to), and talk about the results that you expect to deliver. You can practice this by talking to friends and family — if you realize you are recursively explaining your explanations, that’s when you know that you need to simplify it even further.
Rather than making up words of wisdom to share, I would just suggest reading Patrick’s post for the topics that I haven’t covered here — if you substitute every instance of “programmer” in that article with your own title, 95% of the insights would still be perfectly applicable.
Lastly, to paraphrase his closing paragraph:
At the end of the day, your life happiness will not be dominated by your career... Your career is important, and right now it might seem like the most important thing in your life, but odds are that is not what you’ll believe forever.
Work to live, don’t live to work.
Many thanks to Lisa and Sagana for their feedback.